Common State – Potential Conversation [1]

At the point where the peace process has reached yet another dead end, Eyal Sivan tries to go beyond the same old ideas haunting the debate about the issue Palestine-Israel. Thus the attention is not pointed anymore towards the “two-state solution”. What the film proposes is a common state. In fact, the proposition does not even need to be made: a common state is already existing. Two national communities living on the same land. The revolutionary shift behind the idea of a common state is to move from partition to sharing. Therefore Sivan, through the use of editing, creates an encounter between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews. Twenty interviews on the theme of a common state. Politicians and settlers. Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. Palestinian Arabs settled in Israel and in the occupied territories. The screen is split in two. An Israeli Jew and a Palestinian facing each other. One talks, the other listens. And vice versa. Thus this cinematic conversation becomes the ideal ground on which the idea of a common state could be shaped through the power of dialogue and dialectics.